Count the Signs and Curse the Miles
by Riffir
Summary: SHIELD therapists would say it was natural. That it was the first mission after Budapest, where everything had gone tits up so badly that she'd left feeling grateful to be breathing. Natasha pays a late night visit to Clint and Coulson's apartment. Just a short sketch, nothing fantastic


Natasha opened the door to the small apartment and paused in the doorframe, listening. She could hear the fain whir of the heater as it chugged to life, fighting back the chill in the New York air. There was also the quiet thump and thrum of the neighbors, the breath of traffic outside, constant horns calling out to one another as people traveled through the night. Here, the streets and buildings were practically alive an organism with a constant pulse of sound that never stopped in the city.

She'd arrived back in New York at two fifteen in the morning, and the scent of tinned air and hundreds of bodies with the questionable hygiene found after being trapped for seven hours on a trans-Atlantic flight is all Natasha could smell as she stepped out onto the tarmac. Her ribs hurt, which was to be expected—you didn't get stitches then get surprised when ten hours later they aren't magically better. The mission in Prague hadn't gone badly, but it had still ended with guns drawn and bullets flying and now, amid the push and pull of normal civilization them memory had made her edgy.

She'd hailed a cab, and found herself rattling off Clint's address rather than her own. It had made sense—she could get her bandages changed here, where there were sure to be plenty of medical supplies around with Clint's history of falling off things that were hundreds of feet tall. Besides, and she would rather walk into another war zone than admit this to anyone, she needed something more familiar than the ricochet of bullets.

SHIELD therapists would say it was natural. That this was the first mission after Budapest where everything had gone tits up so badly that she'd left feeling grateful to be breathing, never mind that it was through a tube. Wanting something familiar—someone familiar—was normal.

Too bad normal had next to nothing to do with their jobs. She leaned into the apartment, breathed the smell of dinner long eaten and laundry recently folded and waited a tic. The noise of the outside world bled into the living room, morphed into the furniture and brought it inside.

But beyond that, away from the din of the city, there was a preternatural calm about the apartment. Something was quiet, waiting.

Natasha tapped her nails against the jam of the door, a quiet, almost hollow ratatat. Just like that, the tension bled away, and the apartment breathed again. She relaxed as well and slipped inside, taking a moment to deadbolt the door behind her.

She didn't need to flick the lights on to navigate toward the bathroom. This apartment was just as familiar to her as her own place, and the chance that there might be something left on the floor to trip on was so remote as to border on impossible. She closed the door behind her before finally clicking the lights on, setting slowly onto the edge of the bathtub with a quiet hiss. The ache in her ribs would last a few days the scar across the top of her hip would last longer.

The bandage stuck to her skin as she pulled it free, the stitches underneath raw and angry. She should have changed the bandage the moment she landed, or maybe tried to do something on the seven hour flight she'd been trapped on. Instead, she'd wanted nothing else to do with the airport, with foreign places filled with people she didn't trust. She finally succeeded in pulling free, took a moment to catch her breath, then slowly stood back up, reaching with a grimace for the medicine cabinet.

She'd pulled clean gauze and ointment out when a quiet tap on the door warned her to step back. Clint opened the door before even giving her a chance to respond, crowding close before closing it behind him. "You look like shit," he said cheerfully, taking the ointment out of her hand and motioning her back toward the edge of the tub.

"Nice to see you, too." Natasha sat back down, biting back a hiss. Clint perched on the edge of the closed toilet seat, elbows braced against his knees as he leaned in to examine her abdomen. "Stitches look good, but you'll probably want to wash those."

"Just use a washcloth." The idea of standing in the shower for the amount of time it would take to properly clean the stitches felt like forever, and honestly she didn't really need to be too thorough. What she did need was sleep, a place to let the scrapes and bruises heal, to pad the raw places and find her balance again.

Clint didn't push it, just twisted to a standing position to pull clean clothes from the cabinet above the toilet. He ran the tap until vapor began to fog the vanity mirror, then carefully ran the cloth under it. "Just don't tell Coulson," Clint said as he sat back down, one hand reaching around the far side of her waist, assumedly to hold her steady though it could have been a much for comfort as anything else. "He has this thing about 'proper medical procedure'."

Natasha nodded, and sucked in a rapid breath as Clint pressed the cloth against her side. It was knives and burning, and while she was fairly certain it wasn't infected, she knew that the anger deep inside her stitches would hurt like a bitch for the next few days. "Breathe, Nat," Clint murmured, and Natasha blew the air back out, loud and abrasive against her teeth

A moment later he patted it dry and reached for the ointment. "Is Coulson here?" She asked as Clint gently smeared it over her stitches, calloused fingertips gentle in a way that always surprised her. It wouldn't be too odd for him to be other places – Coulson worked nearly nonstop, and their jobs often took them in different directions from one another—but it was strange for her to have been in the apartment for as long as she had and to not have seen him.

Clint nodded absently. "Sleeping. He takes off for Burma in…" he glanced up at the ceiling, thinking. "…four hours? Something like that." A moment later he spread the bandages against her, pressing against the edges to seal the adhesive to less sensitive skin. That done, Clint stood, stretching his arms above his head and cracking the bones of her back loud enough that Natasha was sure they'd heard it in the next apartment. "Staying the night?" As if she'd dropped by at a reasonable time, instead of letting herself in at… she wasn't sure of the time anymore.

Reaching for her shirt Natasha shrugged. "I can make it back to my place." Never mind that she could have done that originally. She pulled her shirt on slowly, did up the two buttons in the middle.

Clint shook his head. "May as well just stay. Besides, it'll be hell getting a taxi at this time."

"There's always a taxi," Natasha objected, even as she followed him out of the room. She hadn't wanted to go home anyway—no matter how much she currently missed her bed. It was just too far away right now. Instead, she tailed Clint as he flicked the lights off behind him to the back of the apartment, assuming he'd stop into the bedroom to grab a blanket and set her up on the couch. So when he kept going and climbed back into bed, Natasha decided that wariness was not the strangest emotion that she could be feeling right now.

She could just make out Coulson in the darkness, prone on his side with one hand dangling off the top of the bed. "C'mon. I'm too tired to make up the couch. Coulson had classical music playing all night—something with cellists. It's the perfect sedative—I haven't been awake for more than twenty minutes since noon yesterday." A heartbeat and it almost seemed like a barely-there tension slipped away from the set of Coulson's shoulders.

Natasha hesitated a moment longer, then figured why not? She'd slept with Clint before, had woken up with Coulson asleep in a chair barely two feet away more times than she could count, so why would this be any stranger? With Budapest a not-so-distant memory, the reminder that they'd both made it out—that no one had been lost pulling them free of the carnage that had erupted around them—was a welcome one. "You two have the stupidest safe word," she said instead, and slipped under the covers beside Clint.

He shrugged, then slid back against Coulson's chest, head pillowed partially on an arm. Natasha followed, burrowed between sheets and under skin until she could hear the tick of Clint's heart, feel Coulson's arm under her cheek, and suddenly it felt like she could breathe a bit easier once again.


End file.
